Look at those bounces.
After your campaign is finished sending, it’s awfully tempting to skip over the bounces and head straight to the juicy numbers, like who opened and clicked. But it’s important to give your bounce list the once-over. Why’s that? It lets you find addresses that have failed to deliver because of an obvious typo. It’s not uncommon to spot bounces like joe@hotmail.co or ssarah@sarahsflowers.com – clearly good addresses that have just fallen prey to a typo somewhere along the line. If you fix ’em and bundle ’em up in their own audience group, you can easily resend to the corrected addresses.
Do the numbers (but don’t overdo them).
Keep in mind that they’re not the ultimate measure of what’s successful in the wide world of email marketing. More than just stats, those numbers are your audience talking back to you (in that figurative, un-creepy way), so think of understanding your email responses as just one more way of learning about your subscribers.
-> More about numbers? See 4 Tips for Comparing Campaigns, it’s chock full of insight on interpreting your results and, yes, gives some benchmark averages, too.
Follow up.
When people click on campaign links, they’re telling you they’re interested enough in what you’ve mentioned to spend time finding out more. Armed with that information, make plans to send a smaller follow-up campaign to the folks who are most likely to read and respond. For example, you might send a 10%-off coupon just to the folks who clicked on your latest product but didn’t buy it. Or you could follow up with a reminder email to anyone who clicked to find out more about your upcoming seminar.
Think about next time.
As you’re analyzing numbers and follow-up efforts, you may find that you get your best ideas about next time when you’re breaking down the results from this time. Got a hunch that a shorter subject line might have nudged those open rates up an extra few percentage points? Jot it down now and test your theory later. In this case, you might split up your audience to send two versions of the campaign, each with a different subject line, and compare the results later to see what’s more likely to get your audience’s attention.